The problem of the scattering of a spherical acoustic wave by an elastic (lossless) solid cylinder of infinite length immersed in an infinite, inviscid fluid medium is investigated theoretically. The solution is obtained by imposing appropriate boundary conditions (involving stress and normal displacement) at the fluid–solid interface on the relevant differential equations. In order to be able to solve the differential equations, an approximation is made that is equivalent to assuming that the most significant additional contributions to the scattered wave appearing in the fluid (compared with the contributions to the scattered wave arising in the incident plane‐wave case) are those associated with the waves propagating along thezaxis within the solid. Numerical results are presented for a 1000‐Hz wave incident on a 2‐cm‐diam metallic cylinder in water. This is a lowkacalculation (wherekis the wavenumber in the fluid andais the radius of the scatterer). Several different metals are considered. The results are compared to those obtained for an incident plane wave. The scattered pressure wave resulting from an incident spherical wave is shown to differ in amplitude by as much as 20 dB from that resulting from an incident plane wave. (This difference is nontrivial, i.e., it does not result from a minor repositioning of nulls in the scattering pattern.)